We analyze what functions as a YES response and a NO response for
different yes/no questions. This problem is surprisingly complex:
respondents do not always produce overt yes or no lexical items in
sponse to a yes/no question. In addition, when spondents don't include
a clear yes or no word, they may mean to communicate a clear YES or
NO ing, or something else. We find that the classification of yes/no
questions described in (Carletta et al., 1995) for the Edinburgh map
task corpus correlates well with whether a response will be a bare yes
or no, a yes or no plus additional speech, or just speech out an overt
yes or no. Correlation with responses described simply as as "direct"
or "indirect" is less good. We also find that, under the three-way
rization, the strength of a question's expectation for a YES response
predicts the form of the response.